Ray McGovern: CIA, JFK, Deep State, and Ukraine Crisis — #54

Raymond McGovern is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, serving from 1963 to 1990. His CIA career began under President John F. Kennedy and lasted through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. McGovern advised Henry Kissinger during the Richard Nixon administration, and during the Ronald Reagan administration he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief.He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement but returned it in 2006 to protest the CIA's involvement in torture.Steve and Ray discuss:0:00 Introduction01:25 Ray McGovern's assessment of the JFK assassination26:10 Hunter Biden's laptop30:50 Ukraine and the U.S. intelligence services' role in the deep state55:20 Strategic implications of the Ukraine war for the U.S.01:03:38 Are things worse today, versus 1963?Books referenced in this episode:JFK and the Unspeakablehttps://www.amazon.com/JFK-Unspeakable-Why-Died-Matters/dp/1439193886Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedyhttps://www.amazon.com/Marys-Mosaic-Conspiracy-Kennedy-Pinchot/dp/1510708928/Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.--Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.